Recently in Parrot Category

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 20 August 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, and Jesse attended.

Larry:

• decommuting from Copenhagen
• couple of tiring days wandering city
• mostly hacking on STD.pm grammar to speed it up a bit
• mostly propagating ratchet optimization around
• compiles itself in under 90 secs
• it's an improvement
• also working on adding rudimentary symbol table checking
• can figure out where it's misparsing things as function calls
• getting ready for trip to Japan next week
• lightweight languages conference, for some definition of "lightweight"

Patrick:

• returning home from Copenhagen, which was quite productive
• on the plane ride I implemented pieces for precompiled modules in Rakudo
• finished that up last night, so now Rakudo can use precompiled modules
• spectest_regression on my box went from 12 minutes to under 4 minutes
• it also means that use statement can start doing load_bytecode things
• today been working on lazy lists with jonathan
• much of my time in the next couple of days will be writing reports and blog posts, catching up on events at OSCON and YAPC::EU
• also, at YAPC::EU hackathon Jesse and I put in some refactoring on Rakudo's ROADMAP, identifying task dependencies and some relative effort required

Jerry:

• GSOC update; mentors reviewing and submitting final reports
• looks very good that all three are completing
• very successful SOC
• we have good NCI stubs for Parrot, no longer need to write function signatures for things in C header files
• have 700 new tests added by Adrian for Perl 6 spectests
• have mostly complete GC implementation (some debugging needed)

Jesse:

• the recent blog post sounded a little "unhappy" with outcome

Jerry:

• yes, that the student's self-perspective
• however, it's design-wise complete, just not debugged fully

Allison:

• we didn't expect total rewrite of GC system
• we can do the GC integration with Parrot
• he did what we needed him to do, indeed he went much farther than I expected

Patrick:

• chromatic also mentioned that things are farther along than intimated
• just need a bit more debugging before we can pull it back into trunk
• didn't want to potentially block others' progress

Jerry:

• trying to catch up on work done at YAPC::EU
• much didn't happen online
• missed out on some good conversations
• today discussed exportation in Parrot on IRC with Patrick

Jesse:

• getting way too little sleep at YAPC
• very nice conversations with Patrick
• developed ROADMAP, put estimates of relative effort on them
• there's a lot less left to do than I would've estimated
• I also talked to Jonathan about what he'll be up to after his current grants expire

Allison:

• reverse commute from Copenhagen
• diving right into mmd branch, have tasklist
• Andrew and smash very helpful
• finished parsing of multi declarations
• build multi-dispatch table from C declarations
• then deprecate a bunch of C code to get to a single mmd impl
• roll that branch back into trunk
• should finish MMD milestone this week or next
• then it's onto IO implementation

Jesse:

• Perl 6 IO specification was flagged in Saturday's discussions
• Where does that belong?

Larry:

• I've looked at it a few times, it's certainly not complete
• "It's just a library issue!"
• it needs some TLC

Jesse:

• Are there others worth harassing for proto-TLC?

Larry:

• where IO interacts with concurrency I tend to sweep under the carpet
• I tend to not stress about it
• let's do one step better than P5 and not worry about it

Patrick:

• I also think that as long as we can soon provide an implementation that can do basic file I/O and sockets, then people can explore and play in the design space

Larry:

• as long as it's properly OO to begin with, there's lots of room to play

Allison:

• Parrot's IO model is becoming much more OO, yes

Jesse:

• could Rakudo take care of providing an OO interface to Parrot's IO?

Allison:

• independent of Rakudo, Parrot IO needs to be OO
• the old design seems to be "reinventing multiple systems to do the same thing"
• also wanted to mention volunteers working on test.parrot.org
• moving pages over to new parrot.org domain
• as soon as pages are moved over, we just need security certificate

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 06 August 2008. Larry, Jerry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended.

c:

• started the release management expectation for post 1.0
• want to get that nailed down before the end of the year
• applying patches, fixing bugs
• more small projects, the better
• helped Allison get the concurrency branch merged, looks fairly good

Jerry:

• agree with that timeline for getting documents sane on the release process
• lots of traveling for several Parrot and Rakudo hackers
• work has slowed down because of that
• the concurrency branch merge was pretty smooth
• able to dedicate more time to Parrot and Rakudo lately
• reviewing Kevin Tew's GSoC project as it nears completion
• running into a miniparrot build problem
• trying to help him debug that
• taken over mentoring for Adrian while Moritz is on vacation
• he's been pretty quiet this week

Larry:

• the standard grammar parses 99+% of t/
• four of the six failing tests are the fact that it does not install new grammar rules for user-defined operators
• one of the tests fails because the author of the test thought that Perl 6 as should read your mind as to where to apply adverbs
• straightening out some of the parsing snafus
• we need to be able to distinguish between types and variables all over the place
• now :: really isn't a sigil
• it gets in the way all over again
• special symbols like ::?CLASS are specially parsed at this point
• responding to questions on p6l about exception handling with defined-or and MMD semantics
• mostly just hacking on the standard grammar and the tests
• always have to decide whether the test or the grammar is wrong, when they conflict
• thankfully it's often the tests
• going to Copenhagen next week

Nicholas:

• part of the problem of Perl 5 and the CPAN gets solved with Perl 6
• which allows different versions of modules by different authors

Jesse:

• had several chats with Audrey, who's hacking on Perl 6 again
• she's taking Pugs apart into separate useful packages of Haskell code for Hackage
• it's a Voltron-style development method for Pugs
• the current version passes about the same number of tests as the version of two years ago
• it now passes them in 15 minutes, instead of two hours
• a dramatic performance improvement already

Nicholas:

• why?

Jesse:

• some internals changes
• she's documented some of them
• she's waiting for the 6.10 version of GHC, which adds built-in DSL support
• it'll be a lot easier to port the standard grammar for running in Pugs atop GHC
• it's easier to drop pure Perl 6 implementations of Perl 6 on top of Pugs and get them to work then
• now a lot of cleanup and stabilization is going on
• she wants a lot of people hacking on Rakudo, v6.pm, and the tests
• also Haskell hackers
• Flavio's back to hacking, but we haven't caught up
• there's a lot more activity now than three weeks ago
• I'm presuming there's no call next week, with so many people at YAPC::EU

Nicholas:

• applied a patch to get parallel tests working in the Perl 5 core
• running full tests in parallel is only slightly faster than serial

Jesse:

• use -j 9 on a dual-core machine with the new Test::Harness
• --fork also works well
• --save and --slow front-loads the slowest tests, which causes things to run faster

Nicholas:

• Andy Armstrong says this is moderately brittle
• I think he pays more attention to issues from p5p at the moment than Parrot

Last year I received a Perl 6 development grant from the Mozilla Foundation and The Perl Foundation. Below is a copy of the final report I've submitted to close out the grant. It's also available in PDF if anyone wants a more printable version.

My thanks to everyone who helped me with this grant, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

[2008-09-11 update: the original version of this report mis-attributed the Squaak tutorial to Kevin Tew; the corrected author is Klaas-Jan Stol (kjs). My sincere apologies for the mistake, it is now corrected below.]

----------

Perl 6 Development Grant
Final Report

Patrick R. Michaud
September 10, 2008

INTRODUCTION

This is the final report for the Perl 6 and Parrot development grant provided by the Mozilla Foundation and The Perl Foundation. This report summarizes the work performed under the grant, what has been accomplished, and where things are headed from here. As this report illustrates, we have achieved all of the goals and outcomes intended for this grant.

REPORT

The primary focus of the project was to get Perl 6 on Parrot development "over the hump" and acquire a critical mass of infrastructure, developers, and tools from which sustained further development of Perl 6 can take place. The project proposal identified five specific expected outcomes:

1. A working Perl 6 on Parrot implementation that supports commonly used Perl constructs and operators
2. Review and improvements to the Perl 6 language test suite
3. A substantially complete Parrot Compiler Toolkit, with documentation
4. Ongoing, active development efforts for other languages based on the Parrot Compiler Toolkit
5. An increased number of participants in Perl 6 and Parrot design, implementation, and testing

1. A working Perl 6 on Parrot implementation

We now have a substantial Perl 6 implementation on Parrot. At the beginning of this project, we had a rudimentary Perl 6 compiler that could handle some of the basic features and syntax of Perl. However, some key features such as arrays and hashes were only marginally implemented, and most of the translation components of the compiler were written in Parrot's intermediate assembly language (PIR).

Today the Perl 6 on Parrot compiler has been substantially rewritten using the Parrot Compiler Toolkit (described below), and is now known as "Rakudo Perl" or "Rakudo" [1]. Rakudo currently supports arrays, hashes, classes, objects, inheritance, roles, enumeration types, subset types, role composition, multimethod dispatch, type checking, basic I/O, named regular expressions, grammars, optional parameters, named parameters, slurpy parameters, closures, smart match, junctions, and many other features expected from Perl 6. Rakudo has progressed to the point that others are now using Rakudo as an Apache handler ("mod_perl6") [2], a wiki engine ("November") [3], and recently to build applications on Xlib [4]. The Perl Foundation also recently awarded a grant to Vadim Konovalov to implement a Tk GUI interface for Rakudo [5].

During the project there have been many contributors to the development of Rakudo Perl; some of the major contributors include chromatic, Vasily Chekalkin (bacek), Jerry Gay, Jeff Horwitz, Moritz Lenz, Carl Mäsak, Cory Spencer, Stephen Weeks (Tene), and Jonathan Worthington. Jonathan Worthington's efforts deserve special mention: he is primarily responsible for the bulk of the work on classes and types in Rakudo Perl, and much of his work was supported by a grant from Vienna.pm [6].

2. Review and improvements to the Perl 6 test suite

At the beginning of this project, the test suite that existed for Perl 6 had been implemented as part of the Pugs effort and contained approximately 16,000 tests. However, in many cases the tests were out of date with respect to the current Perl 6 language specification, and we needed a way for multiple independent Perl 6 implementations to be able to easily make use of the test suite.

In December 2007 I proposed a structure for reorganizing the test suite [7]; Jerry Gay and Larry Wall then extended this proposal and developed tools to make it easier to share the tests among multiple implementations. In May 2008 Moritz Lenz refactored Rakudo's test harness to provide a "make spectest_regression" target -- since then this has become our primary measure of Rakudo progress [8]. Moritz Lenz also developed a tool to display the progress in graphical form:

Adrian Kreher received a Google Summer of Code grant (with Moritz Lenz and Jerry Gay as mentors) to continue the test suite refactoring [9]. As of early September 2008, the official, refactored test suite contains a little over 8,000 tests, or approximately half the size of the original Pugs test suite. Furthermore, the official suite includes many new tests for object-oriented and typing features of Perl 6 that weren't present in the original test suite. As the graph above indicates, Rakudo is currently passing over 3,200 of the tests in the official suite, and work is continuing on refactoring the suite and increasing Rakudo's pass rate.

3. A substantially complete Parrot Compiler Toolkit, with documentation

As mentioned previously, the compilers that existed for Parrot at the beginning of the project (such as Perl 6) were primarily written in Parrot's intermediate assembly language. This made working on the compilers less accessible to new developers, as well as increasing the time needed to build a compiler. Therefore, the first couple of months of this project were spent on developing the Parrot Compiler Toolkit (PCT) and a simple Parrot language called Not Quite Perl (NQP). PCT provides an abstract syntax tree representation and code generator for Parrot languages; NQP enables compiler writers to easily create compilers and builtin functions for Parrot using a simplified Perl 6 syntax.

Once PCT and NQP were substantially complete, we were then able to convert Perl 6 (now "Rakudo Perl") and many other Parrot compilers to use the new toolkit. This went surprisingly quickly -- most of the existing compilers were converted within just a couple of weeks. In addition, a few new compilers and languages arrived on the scene: Will Coleda and Simon Cozens quickly created an implementation of LOLCODE [10], and Klaas-Jan Stol created a language called "Squaak" as a demonstration and tutorial for the toolkit [11]. A couple of quotes from the period give a sense of how these tools opened up Parrot development to others:

"The real fun, though, has been digging into perl6, the Parrot Perl 6 implementation. Recently, Patrick Michaud has been doing some incredible work building NQP (Not Quite Perl 6), a bootstrapping language for implementing Perl 6, and extensively refactoring the existing Perl 6 on Parrot compiler to fit with it. I'm still very much getting my head wrapped around the whole thing, but it's been easy enough to start digging into and implementing and fixing a few things."

- Jonathan Worthington, December 2007 [12]

"It's really, really true. Parrot lets you implement your own languages using Perl 6 rules for the grammar and Perl 6 for the compiler."

- Simon Cozens, January 2008 [13]

Both PCT and NQP stabilized early in the project; recent changes have been primarily to optimize existing features or make other minor improvements. We expect these tools to continue to evolve as needed to support compiler development; however, given the wide variety of languages being implemented using the toolkit surprisingly few changes have been needed. Primary documentation for the toolkit consists of a Parrot Design Document (PDD26) for the abstract syntax tree representation [14], the Squaak tutorial [11], and numerous example languages in the Parrot repository. More detailed documentation and examples for the toolkit are expected to be developed over the coming months.

4. Ongoing, active development efforts for other languages based on the Parrot Compiler Toolkit

Currently there is active development on at least three languages for Parrot; these include Perl 6 (Rakudo Perl), PHP (Pipp), and Ruby (Cardinal). In addition, there is ongoing but less active development on implementations of Python (Pynie) and Smalltalk (ChitChat). All of these are based on the tools from the Parrot Compiler Toolkit. The Perl 6 and PHP implementations are usable from mod_parrot [2], and our next steps are to improve the toolkit and library conventions to support loading multiple languages simultaneously in Parrot.

5. An increased number of participants in Perl 6 and Parrot design, implementation, and testing

There can be little question that momentum for Perl 6 and Parrot development continues to grow, and the work supported by this grant has been a major catalyst for that growth. For the twelve months prior to September 2007 the Parrot subversion repository had a total of 6,634 commits; in the subsequent twelve months Parrot had 9,686 commits -- a year-over-year increase of 46% in the commit rate.

At the beginning of this project there were perhaps three or four active contributors to the Perl 6 on Parrot compiler (i.e., Rakudo Perl); over the course of the past year that number has increased to at least ten active contributors and at least as many more occasional contributors to Rakudo Perl. Parrot and the Parrot Compiler Toolkit have also garnered new contributors, including several new committers. There are also new teams of developers working on applications based on Rakudo Perl and Parrot, such as the November wiki engine and the Rakudo/Tk GUI interface.

Lastly, recent improvements in the Rakudo compiler architecture will allow much of the Perl 6 runtime library currently written in PIR to be rewritten substantially in Perl 6. This will enable even more new contributors to participate in Perl 6 development.

PROJECT EVALUATION

The project proposal identified five criteria by which the success of this project could be measured:

• Ability to write and test Perl 6 programs and language features
• Passing rate for Perl 6 language test suite
• Improved coverage and accuracy of the Perl 6 language test suite
• Increased number of participants in Perl 6 and Parrot development
• Active development of at least two other languages using Parrot compiler tools

This report demonstrates the success of this project along all of these measures. Perl 6 on Parrot ("Rakudo") is being used to write and test Perl 6 programs and language features, and has become a strong driver for improving the coverage and accuracy of the test suite (and indeed, of the Perl 6 language specification itself). Continual reporting and publication on Perl 6 and Parrot activities continues to attract increased interest and participation from the wider community.

Moreover, this project helped jump-start even larger fund-raising efforts. In May 2008 the Perl Foundation received a $200,000 philanthropic donation from Ian Hague; roughly half of this donation is intended to continue the Perl 6 development efforts that have been part of this project [15]. And, as mentioned earlier, Jonathan Worthington and others are receiving grants for continued work on Rakudo Perl and Parrot [6,8,16].

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

The funding provided by the Mozilla Foundation and The Perl Foundation has indeed enabled us to get Perl 6 on Parrot development "over the hump" in development. We now have a robust platform for higher-level language development on Parrot, along with an active and growing development and support community (which is the hallmark of any successful open source project). All of the desired outcomes of this project have been realized.

Our next steps will be to continue to extend and build upon the work of this project -- increasing Rakudo's coverage of the Perl 6 language and bringing all of our efforts much closer to production releases. In fact, we recently developed a "road map" for Rakudo Perl that identifies the major steps to be taken in the upcoming months and assists in coordinating the remaining development activities [17].

Lastly, I want to express my sincere appreciation to the many people who contribute time and energy to Perl 6 and Parrot, and to give special thanks to the people of the Mozilla Foundation and The Perl Foundation for their ongoing support and enthusiasm for this project. It is a great honor to work and correspond with such a terrific and professional group of individuals.

REFERENCES

1. P. Michaud (January 16, 2008), "The compiler formerly known as 'perl6'", http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/35400
2. J. Horwitz, "Mod_parrot website", http://www.smashing.org/mod_parrot/
3. C. Mäsak, "Announcing November, a wiki in Perl 6", http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/37212
4. http://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk/examples/nci/xlibtest.p6
5. Alberto Sim&otild;es (August 30, 2008), "2008Q3 Grants Results", http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/08/2008q3_grants_results.html
6. "Vienna.pm funds Jonathan Worthington to work on Ra[kudo]" (April 23, 2008), http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/23/2314234
7. P. Michaud (December 20, 2007), "Proposal: refactor the test suite according to synopsis, http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.compiler/msg/ed748490f030da2f
8. P. Michaud (June 16, 2008), "Rakudo test suite progress", http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/36695
9. A. Kreher, "Auzon's Blog: gsoc2008", http://auzon.blogspot.com/search/label/gsoc2008
10. "I HAZ A PARROT" (January 3, 2008), http://lolcode.com/news/i-haz-a-parrot
11. K. Stol (March 9, 2008), "PCT Tutorial Episode 1: Introduction", http://www.parrotblog.org/2008/03/targeting-parrot-vm.html
12. J. Worthington, "Chipping away at perl6", http://www.jnthn.net/cgi-bin/blog_read.pl?id=589
13. S. Cozens (January 3, 2008), "Parrot is really quite wonderful", http://blog.simon-cozens.org/post/view/132
14. "Parrot Abstract Syntax Tree (PDD 26)", http://www.parrotcode.org/docs/pdd/pdd26_ast.html
15. R. Dice (May 16, 2008), "TPF receives large donation in support of Perl 6 development", http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/05/tpf_receives_large_donation_in.html
16. J. Worthington (August 5, 2008), "Multiple Dispatch Design Work", http://use.perl.org/~JonathanWorthington/journal/37101
17. "Perl 6 Development Roadmap", http://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk/languages/perl6/ROADMAP

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 30 July 2008. Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

• OSCON was a success
• now I'm completely free from all responsibilities until at least December
• launched the PIR PDD
• now working on the last few failing language tests before I merge back the concurrency branch
• also spent some time talking to PhD advisors at Cambridge this week
• might start fall 2009, if I can get funding and such
• leaving for London on Saturday
• speaking at the BBC on Tuesday
• may miss next week's meetings

c:

• was very busy with OSCON
• trying to apply a few patches
• trying to get other people to the place where they can help with that
• mostly I need tasks I can do in 30 minutes when I can grab an hour or two
• fixed some small stuff at the hackathon

Allison:

• I need to split up the MMD PDD into bite-sized tasks

Jerry:

• OSCON was fabulous
• our talk was successful
• good feedback and enthusiasm
• the lighting talks with Jeff were successful
• most of my hacking was on mod_parrot
• trying to refactor its configure system into something more robust and portable
• it's just about working in the same state it was before
• hope to reach that point this afternoon
• met with some folks at Microsoft's open source lab on Monday
• promising beginning to a relationship between them and the Parrot Foundation
• the hackathon was productive as well

Jesse:

• I talked to some Sun people about what makes CPAN tick

Will:

• mostly absent the past couple of weeks
• trying to resurrect Tcl, which was untouched for some time
• making progress there on spec tests
• identifying what's left to do

c:

• what's our roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

Jesse:

• I asked Patrick about that
• he said there's a good chance to get that from the hackathon
• if not, he said I could get his attention at YAPC and get his milestones to break down soon

Jerry:

• he spoke on IRC about that today
• he wants to break it down into better granularity and put dependencies between tasks
• have a feeling it'll happen at YAPC::EU
• Jonathan is keen to get together with Allison and Patrick there to discuss related designs

c:

• I've noticed projects in Parrot like Reini's attempt to get installation and loading sorted out
• seems like time to get those sorted out

Jerry:

• it's difficult to have willing volunteers and not get them the right guidance
• and to make "eventually" now

c:

• thinking we should ask Reini for a list of concerns, needs, and use cases
• then try to make a design that addresses more of those

Jerry:

• especially as he's about to leave on a two-week business trip
• sounds like a PDD to me

Allison:

• sounds like several

Jerry:

• library loading, runtime components

c:

• does he have commit access?

Jerry:

• we can encourage him to apply

c:

• thinking about bindings to Prophet
• probably client-side

Jerry:

• we need sockets

Will:

• we have experimental sockets
• we need to make tickets or mark up PDDs for unimplemented things
• I did some of that with PDD 19 today
• stuff's deprecated and only exists in the PDD
• just to warn people who are going to write code that docs don't match reality

Jerry:

• that merits a CAGE task for reviewing the PDDs
• we could spread that out among many people

Will:

• I'll send an email

c:

• and post it on parrotblog

Will:

• no one reads those

c:

• they won't if we don't publish them

Jesse:

• I see them posted places like Reddit fairly often

Allison:

• probably will roll that into parrot.org eventually

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 16 July 2008. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• switched my laptop to Ubuntu for various reasons, mostly work
• helped me get a runnable Pugs too
• haven't worked much on the standard grammar
• mostly thinking about refactoring the names
• thinking about various other questions people are asking
• just checked in a revamp of the closure semantics
• a little under the weather too

Allison:

• almost entirely absorbed by OSCON this week
• hacking a little bit on the three remaining test failures on the pdd25cx branch
• Patrick gave me some information on the PGE failures
• we'll work on that tonight
• hopefully will merge in the branch finally

Jerry:

• haven't done much this week
• will report for Patrick and Jonathan though
• Patrick's working on lexical issues
• he's much closer to understanding how Parrot can handle them
• he's also working with HLL to get it to work within PCT
• then he can make it work within high-level languages itself
• that'll let them use the same named classes as Parrot's base classes (for example, Integer) instead of funky workarounds
• Jonathan added enum support
• fixed a couple of segfaults
• something like 910 new spectests passing between Parrot 0.6.3 and 0.6.4
• that's a great number
• much of it came from the Summer of Code project for the Perl 6 test suite
• Adrian and Moritz have been a big help there

Patrick: (in a followup)

The primarily reason we want HLL support is to take advantage of HLL type mapping, so that str register-to-PMC conversion automatically gives me back a Perl 6 Str object instead of a Parrot String PMC. Same for int to Int, num to Num, and ResizablePMCArray to List conversions.

c:

• things are pretty slow
• traveling and haven't had much time
• still working with Andrew on the GC; he's making progress
• helping Allison; we're getting close
• will definitely start the string branch very soon
• maybe we'll merge that back in stages
• waiting for some guidance on the closure issue

Will:

• Parrot 0.6.4 came out on Tuesday, thanks to Bernhard
• no major new features, although the NEWS listing has lots of little updates
• hopefully will get the concurrency branch merged by the next release, to make it 0.7
• I hate Subversion
• I wonder when we're going to update RT on perl.org
• and that's it

Jesse:

• talked to Richard last week about other interesting funding sources and corporate support for Perl 6
• he's working on that
• general strategizing on that for pushing implementations forward
• sounds like the hackathon is fairly set post-OSCON?

Allison:

• yes

c:

• do we have a sense of prioritization of features, or is that up to implementors?

Jesse:

• it's been up to implementors so far
• every time I've asked, each one has strong feelings about how to prioritize

c:

• I mention it just because I believe that giving people something productive to experiment with sooner is very useful for marketing

Jesse:

• I've talked to Flavio about this, for example
• wondering if there are subsystems of features that could come before others

Jerry:

• what I really want in Rakudo right now is IO so I can use it for work
• it's limited
• you can't do sockets, basically
• that probably won't be fixed until it's fixed in Parrot
• that's Parrot blocking for Rakudo
• as far as other implementations go, there are early features that all implementations share
• I think Larry's said before that the Synopses deliberately don't look ahead too much
• if you do operators before you do objects, that's a way forward
• although parameterized roles are funded work
• and volunteer work

Larry:

• I do use those in my work

c:

• I don't have a sense of our priorities

Larry:

• Perl 6 will be very useful when it does its Perl 5 subset in a way that's better than Perl 5
• that said, there's a danger when Perl 6 gets used in anger by people who start to rely on transient bugs or workarounds for missing features
• there needs to be expectations management

Jerry:

• possibly the best way to do that is to say "Only use what passes in the spectest suite"

Jesse:

• unless there's a way to disable unstable features outside of devel checkouts

Larry:

• but what does it mean that a feature works?
• closure cloning might almost work, but there are some bugs
• we can put a large warning in the documentation that not all features are stable or final yet
• or run into the problem of installing Cabal features to run Pugs
• some packages are under development
• you're lucky if it all works
• it's easy to get an explosion of things that don't all work with each other
• I don't profess to have the right answer
• I don't think there is a right answer
• mostly I think the order of implementation will tend to iron itself out
• everyone has an itch to have the basic stuff working
• everyone has extra itches which may not correspond to other itches
• they're exercising parts of the design that other people aren't exercising
• I want convergence to happen

Jerry:

• provided you don't go crazy trying to keep it all in mind

Larry:

• there may be a need to name development subset versions
• maybe pre-6.0 isn't a sufficiently rich naming scheme
• at least it's an interesting problem

Jesse:

• it would be interesting to find a name for subsets of what will be Perl 6
• the trivial functional subset of Perl 6 that Audrey made in a week was a working subset of Perl 6

Larry:

• and it did junctions

Jesse:

• I've had multiple implementors prod me about how to name or label these things
• here's a thing we've targeted
• we can talk about it as an entity, even if it's not 6.0.0

Larry:

• there's a sense in which the true name is the list of all of the tests it passes

Jerry:

• Rakudo has a ROADMAP
• Patrick keeps it updated
• but he had some unanswered questions in that thread

Larry:

• there's a long list of things blocking from the Parrot end
• a lot of things are in perpetual redesign

Allison:

• I finished the last Parrot design document
• we need resources to implement them

Jerry:

• there were a lot of early prototypes that made it 60 - 80% of the way
• a lot of these features are waiting for a final thing
• it's no fun coding HLLs for a moving target
• they want to wait for the final version, rather than rewriting it several times

Jesse:

• the Rakudo ROADMAP is just a bullet list
• no subtasks, no estimates of effort
• a list in rough priority order
• it could use a couple of more levels of information

Jerry:

• we could make it a hackathon task

Jesse:

• I'll only be there for a couple of hours

Jerry:

• we could pull in some time earlier in the week
• why don't we call these chunks of features "traits"?
• that's an unused term

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 July 2008. Larry, Allison, Jesse, Jerry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• standard grammar parses itself 100%
• thinking about refactoring
• how do we distinguish the use of grammars from grammars used as the current language
• refactoring top level namespaces
• whether STD is part of that name
• meddling in everyone else's discussions
• upgraded the spec on transliteration
• in denial about all of the conferences coming up

Allison:

• absorbed by OSCON and travel for the next couple of weeks
• after that, things will pick up
• working on one (hopefully) final patch to the concurrency branch
• I know it'll resolve one failing test
• hope it'll resolve several PGE failures on the branch
• I'm an hour away from committing that (ideal minutes, but probably an actual hour)
• we're talking about having a hackathon the Saturday after OSCON

Jesse:

• is there a venue?

Allison:

• nothing set up yet, but we do have a default

Jesse:

• how many people?

Allison:

• probably about ten
• Portland State University worked out pretty well for us
• I'll look for contact information

Patrick:

• last week, we passed 1365 tests
• now we're passing 1677, 312 more
• from the last Friday of June to the first Friday of July, we had an increase of 500 tests
• almost 50% more than we were

Jesse:

• how many are newly ported tests and how many used to fail?

Patrick:

• probably an equal mix of both
• a big part of that is getting implicit lexicals working, $_, $!, and $/
• implicit method calls too are working now
• lots of refactoring, especially for builtins
• they now seem to work better in the Any class
• removed a lot of inline PIR code and stuff like that
• spent an hour on the phone with the Houston Perl Mongers last night
• they want to work on the test suite as part of their meetings for a while
• I walked them through building Rakudo, checking out the Pugs repo and test suite, explaining how we do testing
• they plan to have meetings where someone gives a topic, presents how they think it should work, and then they review or create tests for that feature
• they'll either move tests from Pugs into spectests, or add tests to spectests
• I'll try to write that into an article for use Perl or other places
• a step by step guide for contributing tests
• haven't started writing my "This Week in Perl 6 Articles" yet
• should have one by this time next week

Jerry:

• haven't been able to produce much code
• participating in code reviews and design discussions
• this is the mid-term evaluation period for Google Summer of Code
• all of the mentors and students have submitted their mid-term evaluations
• it's all gone smoothly
• all three are going ahead
• the Parrot Foundation is in process of taking over the NLNet grant from TPF
• working with the OSU open source labs to host the website
• expect more on that soon

Allison:

• because we need SSL certificates, they were going to set us up with our own virtual machine
• we'll need to purchase the certificate

Jerry:

• and finalize the purchase of parrot.org

c:

• applied some patches, fixed a couple of bugs
• closed some tickets, but a lot more came in
• worked with Andrew some on fixing bugs in his GC
• getting closer to the point of merge
• approved his milestone, setting some priorities for the second half of the work
• probably won't have much time to work in the next week
• thinking about Closures, not sure Parrot's approach is entirely right

Patrick:

• did you see my note about the PGE bugs in the branch?
• I ran PGE in the concurrency branch yesterday, and get an odd result
• if you run it by using prove, it gives errors
• if you run the PIR directly, it works just fine

c:

• I don't think Parrot::Test adds any flags when it invokes Parrot
• but t/harness does

Patrick:

• it's in the operator precedence parser
• you can specify a particular stop token
• nothing uses that anywhere anymore, but the test tests it
• I don't think anything that uses it

Allison:

• does it throw an exception?

Patrick:

• it just stops parsing at that point
• the caller decides what to do
• it's not detecting that token when it's parsing
• I pass a string with a stop token in the middle
• it's supposed to parse only the first part
• but it doesn't stop at the stop token
• it's just a simple comparison of some sort
• seems kinda weird

Allison:

• maybe it is detecting it, but isn't working right
• but if you're not using exceptions, there's no old exception handler lying around
• so it's not that

Patrick:

• I gave instructions on how to reproduce in my message

Allison:

• my current patch probably won't fix that
• it sounds unrelated

Patrick:

• I might put some tracing in and run it through the harness
• figure out why it's failing to detect that stop token
• also a question for Larry
• do we have an official leaning on method fallback?
• are they in or out?

Larry:

• assume they're out for now

Patrick:

• I'm happy
• I don't have to rewrite my dispatcher
• can I start telling people to organize the test suite that way?

Larry:

• sure

Patrick:

• for the eval built-in, can someone take String.eval and have it do what you expect?

Larry:

• yes

Patrick:

• a method that's exported
• great!

Jerry:

• STD.pm parses itself
• that's fantastic
• is the LTM implementable now in Rakudo or elsewhere?

Larry:

• essentially

Jerry:

• is anything blocking that?

Patrick:

• just time
• but I plan to develop that under the grant
• I think it'll be a significant chunk of code and research
• don't want to do a bunch of PGE refactoring until the concurrency branch is back in trunk though

Jerry:

• I want to get that merged as soon as possible
• it won't make a lot of progress until we do
• hope we can get it before OSCON, even though Allison will be busy

Allison:

• there are only three failing tests

Jerry:

• but HLLs don't work

Patrick:

• I don't want to go into OSCON without languages working on trunk

Larry:

• maybe a reverse merge?

Allison:

• we do that regularly

c:

• I just don't want to block everyone from doing anything until the code gets fixed

Patrick:

• just about everyone who can fix it is on this call

Allison:

• we're almost to the point where it's time for HLL implementors to work on it

c:

• seems like we can pick the top three HLLs that need to work (Rakudo, Pheme, Punie)
• make them pass
• give the other HLL implementors a week to fix their stuff
• then do the merge

Patrick:

• just don't want to show off all of this nice stuff at OSCON, then say "Don't download trunk, it doesn't work"
• but show off the new stuff in Rakudo that's not in the new release
• a week makes a big difference, the way things are moving

c:

• that could be 500 tests

Patrick:

• thanks to Larry for jumping in on the design discussions
• hope you're not frustrated

Larry:

• it's all part of the job
• I'd rather see progress than vice versa

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 02 July 2008. Allison, Will, Jerry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

• still working on the pdd25cx branch
• taking way too long — five remaining test files
• I'm going to have zero tolerance for failing tests, even on a branch
• I broke my natural tendency for that and it's biting me
• I'll be traveling a lot for the next couple of weeks
• hope to get one or two tests passing tomorrow
• two of the failures are PGE, which probably means that no language built on PGE works now, depending on where the test failures apply

Will:

• Tcl still fails a ton of tests on the branch now
• that's not far off the mark

Jerry:

• do you know the root causes?

Allison:

• not in PGE
• but the one I'm working on now is a fundamental problem
• exception handlers used to be scoped
• I shifted them over to global in the first stage
• now I'm shifting them over to the context, so they'll behave like the old system
• the old system used a global stack, which worked badly with CPS
• I hope that this change will fix a bunch of the PGE tests

Jerry:

• Summer of Code is progressing nicely
• we're coming up on midterms now
• everyone seems right on track for the Perl 6 and Parrot projects
• the students are all engaged in their work and the community
• I have high hopes that they'll continue to be around after the summer
• Patrick and I need to coordinate our OSCON talk
• have only had time for administration and question answering
• don't know what my availability will be after next week, but I'll do my best

Patrick:

• this year's Summer of Code is far more productive than previous years, from the Perl 6 and Parrot perspective
• the work that they've done will stick around
• it's really, really helping out
• Rakudo now passes 1365 tests out of the spec repository — 422 over last week
• increase of 75 over this morning
• probably another 50 or so, after the lexical issue is now resolved
• I can fix $_ and implicit method calls
• I think that there are a lot of tests that use those; keep noticing some that aren't passing
• it's been a banner week for adding new tests passes
• some of it is improvements in Rakudo
• moritz and auzon are also doing a great job in refactoring the tests, and making sure Rakudo passes them
• every so often they find a Rakudo bug, we patch it, and we have more passing tests
• Jonathan and chromatic managed to fix lexical handling over the past week
• that removes a big blocker for me
• I cleaned up part of PCT
• about to clean up part of Rakudo
• we should get better code generation out of that
• plan to refactor the builtins to become part of the Any class
• will fix $_, $!, and $/ to work correctly
• will refactor parameter passing and handling
• wrote my third progress report for the Mozilla grant
• the final report will come out around the time of OSCON

c:

• fixed some bugs
• trying to remove as many blockers for Rakudo and other Parrot languages
• continuing to work with Andrew to make sure his new GC branch compiles and runs and passes all tests

Jerry:

• he's at 700 failures out of 7700 now right?

c:

• it didn't even compile a few nights ago
• so he's making good progress

Will:

• trying to rip out old stuff from Parrot
• added a :deprecated flag for ops
• if you run Parrot with warnings, it'll warn in almost every program
• started a branch to remove built-in method handling
• magical non-ops dispatch to class methods on PMCs
• we're trying to get rid of the old object system
• the only one we're really using right now is say anyway
• we don't have to worry about having too many opcodes right now anyway
• removed a lot of custom code for our Perl::Critic configuration
• increased our dependencies, decreased custom code
• fixed a bug for subclassing Float
• we have a whole class of bugs where when you subclass a PMC, the PMC assumes you have the same C type
• we need someone to do a review on all of that
• the RT #48014 is a good place to comment on how to migrate from using the PMC union to PMC attributes

Allison:

• are we doing any hackathoning after OSCON?

Patrick:

• I have Saturday open, so we can do that

Jerry:

• I can do that too

Allison:

• Larry left Saturday and Sunday open

Patrick:

• I can move my flight; I have a place to stay on Saturday night too

Allison:

• if it's just you and Larry, that might be valuable too
• that's five or six of us
• where's a good location?

Patrick:

• it depends on who's coming
• will Damian make it?
• there could easy be six or seven of us

Allison:

• I'll look into spaces
• let's say Saturday for sure, but Sunday is possible

c:

• and Friday afternoon and evening

Jerry:

• I'm meeting with Hank at Microsoft's open source labs
• he's offered some resources, right?

Allison:

• smoke testing
• some Windows licenses

Jerry:

• now that we're very close to having Smolder work
• (today or tomorrow)
• just requires an upgrade to TAP::Harness 3
• we could make this happen
• I'll basically follow up and make things happen

Allison:

• they want something automatable, so they don't have to think about it
• it'll update once a week or whenever, run the tests, and submit a report